I don’t have a desk for my apartment. This really shouldn’t be a source of internal conflict. I’m not in traditional school any more, and I certainly don’t need a dedicated place to make reeds at this point. I work at a desk all day at my job. Why should I spend more time at a desk at home?

At least that’s what my rational brain believes.

My irrational brain is flipping the hell out: “Kathryn! It’s time for school to start, and you are UNPREPARED, DAMMIT! Where will you put your pencils??! What about the notebooks???! You CANNOT SUCCEED IN LIFE without notebooks and a pencil holder!!”

My irrational brain sounds like Selma Bouvier when she talks to me.

My rational brain sounds like like Counselor Deanna Troi.

I don’t know what that means.

For most of the past 24 years, I have had a desk in my home. From infancy, my parents put a desk in my room so that I could have a special place to do homework, and I remember playing school with my big sister there. When I was 13, I discovered oboe reeds and I graduated to a two-desk system so that I could compartmentalize school work and oboe work. That was great. Through high school, my oboe desk become cluttered with knives, pieces of cane, old staples, beeswax and endless spools of thread. I felt like a mad scientist when I worked at that desk, and I loved every minute of it. My school desk, meanwhile, was a good place to hold the overflow from my oboe desk. (I didn’t really do much homework in high school.) The nostalgic memories of this arrangement make Selma happy.

Counselor Troi’s response to this would be to point out that, since college I have been desk-less. And I am doing fine. I have been using a little bookshelf in my bedroom as a home base for paying bills, making reeds, and for storage. In some ways, this setup is more fun than a desk. I am more likely to put things away when I finish using them, I enjoy arranging things on the shelves, and it takes up less space than the traditional desk + chair arrangement.

Luckily I have a few weeks to come to a decision about the apartment-desk-Selma-Counselor Troy situation. If I still haven’t made a choice by mid-September, I’ll probably just start sleeping under the desk in my office at work.